Honey bee anatomy in 3D

Q: What are the three types of honey bees?

Every honey bee colony has three kinds of bees: one queen (the only fully fertile female, who lays the eggs), tens of thousands of workers (sterile females that do every job in the hive), and in spring and summer a few hundred drones (males whose only job is mating).

Get up close with the three bees in every hive: the worker, the queen and the drone. Spin them around, zoom in on the eyes and legs, then turn on x-ray to see what’s inside: the brain, the honey stomach, the heart, the flight muscles, the stinger and the organs that make each one different.

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Worker bee

Size: About 12–15 mm (½ inch)
Lifespan: About 5–7 weeks in summer, several months over winter
In a hive: Tens of thousands per hive

Worker

Tap any part of the bee

Workers are females with undeveloped ovaries, and they do every job in the hive: cleaning cells, feeding larvae, making wax, guarding the entrance and foraging for nectar and pollen. They are the bees you see on flowers and the ones you find in a wall.

Turn on X-ray to see inside: brain, honey stomach, heart, flight muscles, wax glands and venom sac.

Models are to scale with each other and simplified for clarity; real bees are about ½–¾ inch long.

Queen, worker, drone

The three bees in every hive

Worker

Size: About 12–15 mm (½ inch)
Lifespan: About 5–7 weeks in summer, several months over winter
Per hive: Tens of thousands per hive

Queen

The queen is the only fully fertile female in the colony. She mates early in life, stores the sperm for years, and lays up to around 1,500–2,000 eggs a day in peak season. Her long abdomen holds her huge ovaries, and her scent (queen pheromone) keeps the whole colony organized.

Size: About 18–22 mm (¾ inch)
Lifespan: Usually 2–5 years
Per hive: One per hive

Drone

Drones are the males. They have no stinger, don’t forage and don’t make wax. Their job is to mate with a queen from another colony, which is why they have enormous eyes and big flight muscles for spotting and chasing queens in the air. Colonies push them out in the fall.

Size: About 15–17 mm (⅝ inch)
Lifespan: A few weeks to a few months
Per hive: A few hundred in spring and summer

Inside and out

Parts of a honey bee and what they do

A honey bee’s body has three sections: the head (senses, mouthparts and brain), the thorax (legs, wings and flight muscles) and the abdomen (digestion, wax, venom and reproduction). Here is every part shown in the model above.

Body

Head All bees: The head carries the eyes, antennae and mouthparts, and inside it the brain and several glands. A honey bee’s body has three main parts: head, thorax and abdomen. Drone: A drone’s head looks round from the front because his eyes take up most of it.
Mandibles (jaws) All bees: A pair of jaws that open side to side. Workers use them to shape wax into comb, chew, carry debris, groom and fight. Queen: The queen’s mandibles have a notch and are used less for work; the glands beside them make her queen pheromone.Drone: A drone’s mandibles are small; he doesn’t build comb or do chores.
Pollen basket (corbicula) Workers: A smooth, slightly hollow spot on the outside of each hind leg ringed with stiff hairs. Workers comb pollen off their bodies, pack it here with a little nectar, and fly home with a pellet on each leg. The pellet color tells you what flowers she visited. Queens and drones don’t have pollen baskets.
Waist (petiole) All bees: The narrow “wasp waist” between the thorax and abdomen. It lets the abdomen bend, which is how a bee aims her stinger or curls to lay an egg. Everything (gut, nerves, the heart’s tube) passes through this narrow link.
Abdomen All bees: The back section, made of overlapping armored plates that slide like a telescope so the abdomen can stretch and pump air. It holds the honey stomach, gut, heart, reproductive organs and, in females, the stinger. Worker: A worker’s abdomen shows the classic golden and dark brown bands.Queen: The queen’s abdomen is long and tapered to hold her ovaries, and usually smoother and less striped.Drone: A drone’s abdomen is broad and blunt with a rounded tip, since there’s no stinger.

Senses

Compound eyes All bees: Each compound eye is made of thousands of tiny lenses. Bees see ultraviolet light, which reveals patterns on flowers we can’t see, but they can’t see red well. They also see polarized light, which helps them navigate by the sun even on cloudy days. Worker: A worker has roughly 6,900 lenses in each eye.Queen: The queen has the smallest eyes of the three, roughly 4,000–5,000 lenses each. She rarely leaves the hive.Drone: A drone’s eyes are huge, with roughly 8,000+ lenses each, and they meet at the top of his head. He uses them to spot a queen in flight.
Ocelli (simple eyes) All bees: Three small simple eyes on top of the head. They don’t form images; they sense light levels and help the bee stay level and oriented in flight. So yes, a honey bee has five eyes. Drone: On a drone the ocelli are pushed down onto the face because his compound eyes take over the top of the head.
Antennae All bees: Bees smell, touch and taste with their antennae. They pick up flower scents, the colony’s own smell, pheromones, vibrations and even air currents. Each antenna bends at an “elbow” like a jointed arm. Worker: Workers and queens have 12 segments in each antenna.Queen: Workers and queens have 12 segments in each antenna.Drone: Drones have 13 antenna segments and far more scent receptors, tuned to pick up the queen’s pheromone from a distance.

Movement

Thorax All bees: The middle section, packed almost entirely with flight muscle. All six legs and all four wings attach here. Its dense hair traps pollen and helps keep the bee warm.
Wings (4) All bees: Honey bees have four wings: a large front pair and a smaller back pair. In flight, a row of tiny hooks (hamuli) on each hind wing locks it onto the front wing so each side works like one big wing. They beat about 200–230 times a second, which is the buzz you hear. Workers also fan their wings to cool the hive and evaporate water from nectar. Queen: The queen’s wings look short because her abdomen is so long; they only cover about two-thirds of it.Drone: Drones have the largest wings and flight muscles of the three; they fly to drone congregation areas to find queens.
Legs (6) All bees: Six jointed legs, each ending in claws and a sticky pad for gripping comb or glass. The front legs have a notch (the antenna cleaner) that the bee pulls each antenna through to clean it. Bees also taste with their feet.
Flight muscles All bees: Two sets of powerful muscles fill the thorax. They don’t move the wings directly; they squeeze and stretch the thorax so it flexes and flicks the wings. Bees also shiver these muscles without moving their wings to generate heat, which is how a cluster keeps its brood near 93–95°F. Drone: Drones have the biggest flight muscles, built for fast mating flights.

Nervous system

Brain All bees: A honey bee brain has about a million neurons, tiny next to ours but remarkably capable. Large optic lobes process vision, and the “mushroom bodies” handle learning and memory, letting a forager remember flower locations, colors and the waggle dance directions from her sisters. Drone: A drone’s optic lobes are especially large to process input from his huge eyes.
Ventral nerve cord All bees: A nerve cord running along the belly with clusters of nerve cells (ganglia) along it. The ganglia run the legs, wings and stinger fairly independently of the brain, which is why a stinger keeps pumping venom after it tears free.

Digestive system

Proboscis (tongue) All bees: A long, hairy tongue that folds up under the head when not in use. It works like a mop and straw together to lap up nectar, water and honey. Worker: A worker’s tongue is the longest, around 6 mm, so she can reach nectar deep in flowers.Queen: The queen’s tongue is shorter; workers feed her most of her food.Drone: A drone’s tongue is short. He can take honey from cells but mostly relies on workers to feed him.
Esophagus All bees: A thin tube that carries food from the mouth through the head, the thorax and the narrow waist into the honey stomach.
Honey stomach (crop) All bees: A stretchy storage sac, separate from the bee’s real stomach. Foragers fill it with nectar or water and carry it home, then pass it mouth-to-mouth to house bees. Enzymes are added along the way as nectar becomes honey. Worker: A worker’s crop can hold up to around 40 milligrams of nectar, a large share of her body weight.Queen: The queen’s crop is small; workers feed her rich food.Drone: A drone’s crop is small; he fills it with honey before a mating flight.
Proventriculus (valve) All bees: A muscular valve between the honey stomach and the true stomach. It lets the bee keep nectar in storage while filtering out pollen grains and letting only what she needs into her own digestion.
Midgut (ventriculus) All bees: The bee’s true stomach, where food is digested and absorbed. Its ringed folds make it look like a little accordion.
Malpighian tubules All bees: Around a hundred hair-thin tubes that pull waste out of the blood and dump it into the gut. They do the job our kidneys do.
Hindgut & rectum All bees: The last stretch of gut, which reabsorbs water. The rectum can stretch a lot: in winter bees hold their waste for weeks until a warm day lets them make a “cleansing flight” outside. That’s the yellow-brown spotting you sometimes see on cars near a hive.

Glands

Hypopharyngeal glands Workers: Long strings of bead-like glands in a young worker’s head that make royal jelly and brood food. Nurse bees feed it to larvae, and to the queen her whole life. In older foragers these glands shrink and make enzymes that turn nectar into honey instead.
Mandibular glands All bees: Glands at the base of the jaws. Worker: In workers they add to brood food and make an alarm scent.Queen: In the queen they’re large and produce queen mandibular pheromone, the scent that tells the colony “the queen is here,” stops workers from raising new queens and attracts drones on her mating flight.Drone: In drones they’re small.
Salivary glands All bees: Glands in the head and thorax that make saliva, which helps dissolve crystallized honey and sugar, moisten food and soften wax.
Wax glands Workers: Four pairs of glands on the underside of a young worker’s abdomen. They release liquid wax that hardens into tiny clear flakes, which she chews and shapes into comb. It takes a lot of honey to make wax, which is why every inch of comb in a wall represents real work by the colony.
Nasonov gland Workers: A scent gland near the tip of a worker’s abdomen. She raises her abdomen and fans her wings to release a lemony “come here” scent that guides other bees to the hive entrance, a new home or a swarm cluster. Bees lined up at an entrance with their tails in the air, fanning, are doing exactly this.

Circulation & breathing

Heart (dorsal vessel) All bees: Bees have an open circulatory system: a long tube along the back pumps blood (called hemolymph) forward into the head, and it then washes back through the body around the organs. Bee blood is clear to pale yellow, not red, because it doesn’t carry oxygen.
Air sacs & tracheae All bees: Bees don’t have lungs. Air comes in through small holes along the sides (spiracles) into a network of tubes (tracheae) that branch to every cell, plus balloon-like air sacs in the abdomen. Pumping the abdomen pushes air through, which is the “breathing” motion you can see on a resting bee. Drone: Drones have very large air sacs, which helps power long flights.

Reproduction

Ovaries Workers & Queens: The egg-producing organs, made of many thin tubes called ovarioles. Worker: A worker’s ovaries are tiny, with only a few ovarioles, because the queen’s pheromone and brood scent keep them shut down. If a colony is queenless for weeks, some workers start laying unfertilized eggs that only become drones (“laying workers”).Queen: The queen’s ovaries are enormous, with about 150–180 ovarioles each, and fill most of her abdomen. This is why she can lay up to around 1,500–2,000 eggs a day in spring.
Spermatheca Queens: A small, pearly sphere where the queen stores the sperm from her mating flights, usually from 10–20 drones, for the rest of her life. She chooses whether to fertilize each egg: fertilized eggs become females (workers or queens) and unfertilized eggs become drones.
Testes Drones: In a young drone the testes are large; by the time he’s ready to fly, the sperm has moved into the seminal vesicles and the testes have shrunk.
Mucus glands & seminal vesicles Drones: Large white glands and storage tubes that hold sperm and mucus, ready for mating.
Endophallus Drones: The drone’s mating organ, kept folded inside his abdomen. Mating happens in mid-air, and the organ tears away, so the drone dies right after. Drones that never mate are pushed out of the hive when nectar runs short in the fall.

Defense

Stinger Workers & Queens: The stinger is a modified egg-laying tube, so only females have one. It’s pushed in by two sliding lancets that work back and forth. Worker: A worker’s stinger is barbed. In thick skin like ours it gets stuck, tears free with the venom sac, and the bee dies. The sac keeps pumping, so scrape a stinger out quickly.Queen: The queen’s stinger is smooth and curved, and she can use it more than once, mostly against rival queens. She almost never stings people.
Venom sac & gland Workers & Queens: Long, thin glands make venom and store it in a small sac connected to the stinger. Worker venom also carries an alarm scent that smells like bananas and tells other bees to defend. Queen: The queen has a venom sac too, but she saves her sting for rival queens.

Why it matters

Every removal starts with knowing the bee

When I open up a wall or roof, I’m looking for exactly what this page shows: capped brood and larvae from the queen’s eggs, honey stored by foragers, and the queen herself. Finding her and moving the brood is what lets the colony settle into its new box instead of dying. Learn how a live bee relocation works, or tell honey bees from yellow jackets and wasps.

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Questions

Honey bee anatomy FAQ

What are the three types of honey bees?

Every honey bee colony has three kinds of bees: one queen (the only fully fertile female, who lays the eggs), tens of thousands of workers (sterile females that do every job in the hive), and in spring and summer a few hundred drones (males whose only job is mating).

How many eyes does a honey bee have?

Five. Two large compound eyes made of thousands of tiny lenses, plus three small simple eyes (ocelli) on top of the head that sense light and help with balance in flight.

Do bees have a heart and lungs?

Bees have a heart: a long tube along the back that pumps clear-to-yellow blood (hemolymph) forward. They have no lungs; air flows in through holes along the body (spiracles) into a network of breathing tubes and air sacs.

Why does a honey bee die after it stings?

A worker’s stinger is barbed. In thick, elastic skin like ours the barbs catch, and when she pulls away the stinger, venom sac and part of her abdomen tear off. Queens have a smooth stinger and can sting more than once. Drones have no stinger at all.

What is a honey bee’s honey stomach?

The honey stomach (crop) is a stretchy storage sac separate from the bee’s real stomach. Foragers fill it with nectar, carry it home and pass it to other bees, adding enzymes along the way as nectar becomes honey. A valve called the proventriculus keeps the load from going into her own digestion.

How can you tell a queen, worker and drone apart?

The queen has a long, tapered abdomen that sticks out past her wings. Drones are big and blocky with huge eyes that meet at the top of the head and a blunt rear end. Workers are the smallest, with the familiar gold and brown stripes and pollen baskets on their back legs.